Building Our Own Cage

I'm now convinced that Ted Kaczynski was a visionary when he wrote Industrial Society and Its Future. When I first read it, I believed that the future he described could be avoided. I believed what Timothy May wrote in The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto about how technology could be used as a force against the State. Most foolishly though, I believe that the masses would act in their own self-interest.

Rather than be a weapon the masses could wield against the State, technology has become almost exclusively a tool the State wields against us:

In recent months, civil liberties groups have warned that adding facial recognition to consumer smart glasses could turn everyday recording into something more troubling: real-time facial identification. It reflects a broader shift already underway, where images and videos captured for one purpose can later be searched, matched, and used for another.

Everywhere you go, you're being recorded. It's long been standard practice for businesses to install surveillance cameras inside and outside of their properties. That practice has now extended to residences. Many people install Ring cameras, which use facial recognition to identify people. Inside their houses they often have devices like Alexa, which have microphones that are always listening. No matter where you go, you're surrounded by people with smartphones with shockingly good cameras. Soon they may all be wearing camera-equipped smart glasses. Most of the data recorded using these technologies is uploaded to the Internet. Ring and Alexa upload recorded data to Amazon's servers. Footage recorded with smartphones and smart glasses typically ends up posted to social media. Once the data hits third-party servers, it's available to law enforcement either through an agreement with the company or via a warrant:

The basic approach is now routine: People record the state, or anything else—as in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol—and the state compiles that footage and data into a searchable environment, which may later be used to identify some of the same people who made the footage.

Surveillance goes beyond video and audio recordings. Most purchases are made with credit cards or applications like Venmo. Every transaction that goes through these systems is recorded. In the case of Venmo, transactions are treated like social media posts by default. Credit cards and payment applications are so prevalent now that many venues won't accept cash at all. This wouldn't be so bad if people exercised common sense. But I've been in enough conversations and seen enough comments online to know that many people, including drug dealers, use these applications when buying and selling illicit goods. The comments are typically found on social media, which means people are stupidly posting evidence against themselves on a publicly accessible forum.

We've built our own cage. All it took was a handful of large technology companies to offer us convenience. While there are many people who bitch and whine about it, they typically do their bitching and whining on the very social media platforms that are being used to surveil them. Furthermore, they typically use credit cards and payment applications for all of their transactions. In other words, even thought they recognize the problem, they refuse to forego convenience to be part of the solution.

Technology is ultimately a tool. Tools are neither good nor evil. However, humans in aggregate are stupid. Stupid people use tools stupidly. Individuals can certainly use technology intelligently, but truly self-actualized individuals are rare. Most people have allowed their individuality to be subsumed by the herd and are therefore incapable of doing much of anything, including use technology, intelligently. They will ensure that technology as a whole continues to be a tool of oppression rather than a tool of individual empowerment. Unfortunately us self-aware individuals are caught in the cage created by the herd.

Kaczynski believed that the use of violence for the purpose of starting a revolution was the only solution. This is one point where I disagree with him. Violence won't start a revolution. The only response the masses have to violence is to pull out their smartphones, record it, and upload it to social media. Their lack of self-awareness is so complete that they regularly record violence rather than flee from it. The only solution I can see is breaking the masses away from the herd by making them into egoists. This, however, is equally impossible.

The only upside in all of this is that those few of us who are self-actualized individuals can at least mitigate some of the damage inflicted upon us by the herd. Simple actions like removing ourselves from social media, using cash to pay for goods and services, self-hosting online services, freeing our devices from the control of the large tech companies, and not taking our smartphones with use everywhere reduces our surveillance footprint (although we cannot eliminate it). Refusing to be a node in the State's surveillance network by not recording and especially not uploading footage to the Internet prevents us from being part of the problem. The herd is too large to be avoided, but we can at least separate ourselves as much as possible from it.